Love
never faileth. 1 Corinthians 13:8
"Love
never faileth"! What a wonderful phrase that is! but what
a still more wonderful thing the reality of that love must be; greater
than prophecy—that vast forth-telling of the mind and purpose of God;
greater than the practical faith that can remove mountains; greater than
philanthropic self-sacrifice; greater than the extraordinary gifts of
emotions and ecstasies and all eloquence; and it is this love that is shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
The Highest
Human Love
Greater
love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
(John 15:13)
This wonderful verse, quoted
so often during this terrible war, has suffered from contortions of
belittling as well as of exaggeration; but the great words stand as those
of the Lord Jesus Christ. They exhibit the highest human love, not the
highest Divine love. The love that lays down the life for a man’s
friends is irrespective of religious faith or of lack of it. Atheists and
pagans, saints and sinners alike, have exhibited this highest human love.
The revival of this greatest
human love has been superb during this war, but there has not been as yet
any sign of a corresponding great revival of self-sacrificing love on the
part of the Church of Christ. Self-regarding love is part weakness, part
selfishness, and part romance; and it is this self-regarding love that so
counterfeits the higher love that, to the majority, love is too often
looked upon as a weak sentimental thing.
"My Utmost for the
Highest" was the motto of the great artist G. F. Watts, and it has
very evidently been the watchword of thousands of young men whose names
only figure now on the list of the killed. But let it never be forgotten
that the highest human love has nothing to do with religious faith, and
the distortion of this mighty statement of Christ Jesus arises from the
misunderstanding of this point.
Probably the finest
scriptural incident illustrating the highest human love is recorded in 2
Samuel 23:15-17.
The Highest
Divine Love
But
God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
This is the characteristic of
the Divine love: not that God lays down His life for His friends, but that
He lays down His life for His enemies (v. 10). That is not human love. It
does not mean that no human being has ever laid down his life for his
enemies, but it does mean that no human being ever did so without having
received the Divine nature through the Redemption of our Lord.
This statement is alien to
many modern minds imbued with evolutionary conceptions, because that type
of intellectual thinking dislikes any break between the human and the
Divine; it is easy to say that human love and Divine love are one and the
same thing; actually they are very far from being the same. It is also
easy to say that human virtues and God’s nature are one and the same
thing; but this, too, is actually far from the truth. We must square our
thinking with facts. Sin has come in and made a hiatus between human and
Divine love, between human virtues and God’s nature, and what we see now
in human nature is only the remnant and refraction of the Divine. Our Lord
clearly indicates that a man needs to be born from above before he can
possess or exhibit the oneness of the human and Divine in his own person.
In theoretic conception the human and the Divine are one; in actual human
life sin has made them two. Jesus Christ makes them one again by the
efficacy of the Atonement. Hence the distinction is not merely
theological, but experimental.
"God
commendeth His own love." Human relationships may be
used to illustrate God’s love, e.g., the love of father, mother, wife,
lover; but illustration is not identity. Human love may illustrate the
Divine, it is not identical with the Divine love because of sin. God’s
own love is so strange to our natural conceptions that we see no love in
it; not until we are awakened by the conviction of our sin and anarchy do
we realize God’s great love towards us—"while
we were yet sinners."
Tennyson’s phrase, "We
needs must love the highest when we see it, not Lancelot, nor
another," is sufficiently true to be dangerously wrong; for when the
religious people of our Lord’s day saw the Highest incarnate before
them, they hated Him and crucified Him.
The words of the prophet
Isaiah are humiliatingly true of us. When we see the Highest, He is to us
as "a root out of a dry ground: He hath no
form nor comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we
should desire Him" (Isaiah 53:2). The highest Divine love
is not only exhibited in the extreme amazement of the tragedy of Calvary,
but in the laying down of the Divine life through the thirty years at
Nazareth, through the three years of popularity, scandal, and hatred, and
furthermore in the long pre-incarnate years (cf. Revelation 13:8).
The Cross is the supreme
moment in Time and Eternity, and it is the concentrated essence of the
very nature of the Divine love. God lays down His life in the very
creation we utilize for our own selfish ends. God lays down His life in
His long-suffering patience with the civilized worlds which men have
erected on God’s earth in defiance of all He has revealed. The
Self-expenditure of God for His enemies in the life and death of our Lord
Jesus Christ, becomes the great bridge over the gulf of sin whereby human
love may cross over and be embraced by the Divine love, the love that
never fails.
The Highest
Christian Love
No
longer do I call you servants; . . . but I have called you friends.
(John 15:15)
This is the wonderful way in
which our Lord connects the highest human love with the highest Divine
love; the connection is in His disciples. The emphasis is on the
deliberate laying down of the life, not in one tragic crisis, but in the gray
face of actual facts unillumined by romance, obscured by the mist of the
utter commonplace, spending the life out deliberately day by day for my
Divine Lord and His friends—this is the love that never fails; and mark,
the love that never fails is not human love alone, nor Divine love alone,
but the at-one-ment of them in the disciples of Jesus.
We reveal the impoverished
meanness of our conceptions by the words we use in the actual business of
life—"economy, " "insurance," "diplomacy."
These words cover by euphemism our ghastly disbelief in our Heavenly
Father. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as
your Father which is in heaven is perfect," and the
connection of this perfection with its context must be observed. Its
context is Matthew 5:45, "that ye may be
sons of your Father which is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise on
the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust."
Our Lord means by being perfect then obviously that we exhibit in our
actual relationships to men as they are, the hospitality and generosity
our Heavenly Father has exhibited to us. In 2 Corinthians 4:7-11 Paul
makes it plain that there are no ideal conditions of life, but "My
Utmost for His Highest" has to be carried out in the actual
conditions of human life.
The highest Christian love is
not devotion to a work or to a cause, but to Jesus Christ. In the early
days of our Lord’s life the grief and astonishment of Mary and Joseph
was caused by this very thing, "And He said
unto them, How is it that ye sought Me? wist ye not that I must be in My
Father’s house? And they understood not the saying which He spake unto
them" (Luke 2:49-50). Causes are good, and work is good,
but love in these fails. The laying down of the life for Jesus Christ’s
sake exhibits the Christian love that never fails. Our Lord was viewed as
wild and erratic because He did not identify Himself with the cause of the
Pharisees or with the Zealots, yet He laid down His life as the servant of
Jehovah. "Wherefore Jesus also, that He
might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered without the gate,"
and the writer immediately follows it up with the injunction, "Let
us therefore go forth unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach. For
we have not here an abiding city, but we seek after the city which is to
come" (Hebrews 13:12-14).
Thank God that we have the glorious
fighting chance of identifying ourselves with our Lord’s interests in
other people in the love that never fails, for that love "suffereth
long, and is kind; . . . envieth not; . . . vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not
provoked, taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness,
but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things,
hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth." |
